Thursday, March 17, 2011

Sync All your Bookmarks Everywhere

Technology Thursday Some technological gadgets and tools provide major productivity boosts (or at least feel like they do - some say the science is still out.) Anyway, I'm talking about things like digital word processors (I'm ancient enough to remind liquid white out and jammed typewriter keys from, yes, typing too fast), and, of more recent vintage, Alpha Geek tools like Dropbox or a good RSS reader or virtual machines. But there are also tools that simply smooth things out a little bit by providing perhaps modest efficiencies and help, without having quite such a dramatic impact. Tools like Amazon's Universal Wishlist or fancy cut-and-paste utilities. I've found another such tool recently - a web browser bookmark manager called XMarks.

Do you browse the Internet from more than one computer? If so, this could be very handy for you.

I have 3 computers that I might be using at any given time. And two of those have Windows virtual machines on them. Which means there are 5 browsers across three computers from which I'm typically browsing the web. -Marks gives me a way to have exactly the same set of browser bookmarks in the same order/configuration across all browsers. It's super handy. There is a set of links that I tend to place at the top of my Firefox browser because I click over to them often. These include a link to my weblog, the link to Instapaper's Read Later feature, the link to my Pinboard bookmarking tool, and various other things. What has happened over time is that each of the 5 browsers I use would end up with a slightly different set of bookmarks in a slightly different order. X-Marks cleans all that up.

It syncs your bookmarks from all your browsers to one place and then replicates them so that your bookmark environment is the same everywhere. But even better, it allows you some discretion. You can set up a profile so that certain computers only see/sync certain bookmarks. The browser on the PC in my office at work doesn't need to have all of my bookmarks, nor do I want it to. But you get the idea. I use Firefox as my primary browser on every platform but XMarks works across different browsers. The website says:

Install Xmarks on each computer you use, and it seamlessly integrates with your web browser and keeps your bookmarks safely backed up and in sync. Xmarks will sync across browsers too. Today we support Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari (Mac OS).

It's a free service. If you upgrade to Premium - which I haven't done yet - it allows you to integrate your mobile devices and open tabs. Since I typically have dozens of tabs open at any given moment, it's very tempting. And it's not that expensive ($1/month) But I'm also trying to be frugal about adding recurring costs to my budget, so it's on my Someday/Maybe list. (I recognize how silly that $1/month looks next to the iPad2 I recently announced I'd ordered on Twitter. Baby steps!) Anyway, I just started using this tool a few weeks ago, and already consider it essential. Check it out.

Comments

I first used Xmarks to migrate bookmarks from one computer at another (at two different locations on two different browsers and two different operating systems -- it was just easier than figuring out which files to copy). It worked brilliantly for that. I continue to use it to keep my bookmarks sync'ed. I agree that it's not one of my "live or die" tools, but it's nice to have.